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The Philological Method of the Veda
No interpretation of the Veda can be sound which does not rest on a
sound and secure philological basis; and yet this scripture with its
obscure and antique tongue of which it is the sole remaining document
offers unique philological difficulties. To rely entirely on the traditional
and often imaginative renderings of the Indian scholars is impossible
for any critical mind. Modern philology strives after a more secure
and scientific basis, but has not yet found it.
In the psychological interpretation of the Veda there are, especially,
two difficulties which can only be met by a satisfactory philological
justification. This interpretation necessitates the acceptance of several
new senses for a fair number of fixed technical terms of the Veda, --
terms, for example like uti, avas, vayas. These new renderings satisfy
one test we may fairly demand; they fit in to every context, clarify
the sense and free us from the necessity of attributing quite different
significances to the same term in a work of so fixed a form as the Veda.
But this test is not sufficient. We must have, besides, a philological
basis which will not only account for the new sense, but also explain
how a single word came to be capable of so many different meanings,
the sense attached to it by the psychological interpretation, those
given to it by the old grammarians and those, if any, which are attached
to it in later Sanskrit. But this is not easily possible unless we find
a more scientific basis for our philological deductions than our present
knowledge affords.
Secondly, the theory of the psychological interpretation depends very
often on the use of a double meaning for important words, -- the key-words
of the secret teaching. The figure is one that is traditional in Sanskrit
literature and sometimes employed with an excess of artifice in the
later classical works; it is the slesa or rhetorical figure of double
entendre. But its very artificiality predisposes us to believe that
this poetical device must belong necessarily to a later and more sophisticated
culture. How are we to account for its constant presence in a work of
the remotest antiquity? Moreover, there is a peculiar extension of it
in the Vedic use, a deliberate employment of the "multi-significance"
of Sanskrit roots in order to pack as much meaning as possible into
a single word, which at first sight enhances the difficulty of the problem
to an extraordinary degree. For instance, the word, asva, usually signifying
a horse, is used as a figure of the Prana, the nervous energy, the vital
breath, the half-mental, half-material dynamism which links mind and
matter. Its root is capable, among other senses, of the ideas of impulsion,
force, possession, enjoyment, and we find all these meanings united
in this figure of the Steed of Life to indicate the essential tendencies
of the Pranic energy. Such a use of language would not be possible if
the tongue of the Aryan forefathers obeyed the same conventions as our
modern speech or were in the same stage of development. But if we can
suppose that there was some peculiarity in the old Aryan tongue as it
was used by the Vedic Rishis by which words were felt to be more alive,
less merely conventional symbols of ideas, more free in their transitions
of meaning than in our later use of speech, then we shall find that
these devices were not at all artificial or far-fetched to their employers,
but were rather the first natural means which would suggest themselves
to men anxious at once to find new, brief and adequate formulae of speech
for psychological conceptions not understood by the vulgar and to conceal
the ideas contained in their formulae from a profane intelligence. I
believe that this is the true explanation; it can be established, I
think, by a study of the development of Aryan speech that language did
pass through a stage peculiarly favourable to this cryptic and psychological
use of words which in their popular handling have a plain, precise and
physical significance.
I have already indicated that my first study of Tamil words had brought
me to what seemed a clue to the very origins and structure of the ancient
Sanskrit tongue; and so far did this clue lead that I lost sight entirely
of my original subject of interest, the connections between Aryan and
Dravidian speech, and plunged into the far more interesting research
of the origins and laws of development of human language itself. It
seems to me that this great inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations
of linguistic scholars should be the first and central aim of any true
science of Philology.
Owing to the failure of the first hopes which attended the birth of
modern Philology, its meagre results, its crystallisation into the character
of a "petty conjectural science", the idea of a Science of
Language is now discredited and its very possibility, on quite insufficient
reasoning, entirely denied. It seems to me impossible to acquiesce in
such a final negation. If there is one thing that Modern Science has
triumphantly established, it is the reign of law and process of evolution
in the history of all earthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature
of Speech, in its outward manifestation as human language it is an organism,
a growth, a terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constant psychological
element and is therefore more free, flexible, consciously self-adaptive
than purely physical organisms; its secret is more difficult to seize,
its constituents yield themselves only to more subtle and less trenchant
methods of analysis. But law and process exist in mental no less than
in material phenomena in spite of their more volatile and variable appearances.
Law and process must have governed the origins and developments of language.
Given the necessary clue and sufficient data, they must be discoverable.
It seems to me that in the Sanskrit language the clue can be found,
the data lie ready for investigation.
The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at a more satisfactory
result in this direction, was its preoccupation in the physical parts
of speech with the exterior morphology of language and in its psychological
parts with the equally external connections of formed vocables and of
grammatical inflexions in kindred languages. But the true method of
Science is to go back to the origins, the embryology, the elements and
more obscure processes of things. From the obvious only the obvious
and superficial results. The profundities of things, their real truth,
can best be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that the
surface of phenomena conceals, into that past development of which the
finished forms present only secret and dispersed indications or into
the possibilities from which the actualities we see are only a narrow
selection. A similar method applied to the earlier forms of human speech
can alone give us a real Science of Language.
It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief and devoted
to another subject that it is at all possible to present the results
of the work that I have attempted on these lines. [I propose to deal
with them in a separate work on "The Origins of Aryan Speech".
] I can only briefly indicate the one or two features which bear directly
on the subject of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them here solely
to avoid any supposition in the minds of my readers that in departing
from the received senses of certain Vedic words I have simply taken
advantage of that freedom of ingenious conjecture which is at once one
of the great attractions and one of the most serious weaknesses of modern
Philology.
My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals,
are in no sense artificial products, but growths, -- living growths
of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds
develop a small number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny
which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes,
clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common
psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development
of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man,
of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities
and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association
was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and
definite psychological laws.
In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we
should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain
general sensations and emotion-values. It was the nerves and not the
intellect which created speech. To use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu,
not Indra, were the original artificers of human language. Mind has
emerged out of vital and sensational activities; intellect in man has
built itself upon a basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions.
By a similar process the intellectual use of language has developed
by a natural law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which
were originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality,
have evolved into fixed symbols of precise intellectual significances.
In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to any precise idea.
It had a general character or quality (guna), which was capable of a
great number of applications and therefore of a great number of possible
significances. And this guna and its results it shared with many kindred
sounds. At first, therefore, word-clans, word-families started life
on the communal system with a common stock of possible and realised
significances and a common right to all of them; their individuality
lay rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive
right to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language
was a development from this communal life of words to a system of individual
property in one or more intellectual significances. The principle of
partition was at first fluid, then increased in rigidity, until word-families
and finally single words were able to start life on their own account.
The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes when
the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which
it represents. For in the first state of language the word is as living
or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In
its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important,
the sound secondary.
Another feature of the early history of language is that it expresses
at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are the most general
notions possible and generally the most concrete, such as light, motion,
touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc. Afterwards there is
a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of idea. The progression
is from the general to the particular, from the vague to the precise,
from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract,
from the expression of an abundant variety of sensations about similar
things to the expression of precise difference between similar things,
feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of
association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and,
although no doubt due to the environments and actual experiences of
the men who spoke the language, wear the appearance of fixed natural
laws of development. And after all what is a law but a process which
has been worked out by the nature of things in response to the necessities
of their environment and has become the fixed habit of their action?
From this past history of language certain consequences derive which
are of considerable importance in Vedic interpretation. In the first
place by a knowledge of the laws under which the relations of sound
and sense formed themselves in the Sanskrit tongue and by a careful
and minute study of its word-families it is possible to a great extent
to restore the past history of individual words. It is possible to account
for the meanings actually possessed by them, to show how they were worked
out through the various stages of language-development, to establish
the mutual relations of different significances and to explain how they
came to be attached to the same word in spite of the wide difference
and sometimes even the direct contrariety of their sense-values. It
is possible also to restore lost senses of words on a sure and scientific
basis and to justify them by an appeal to the observed laws of association
which governed the development of the old Aryan tongues, to the secret
evidence of the word itself and to the corroborative evidence of its
immediate kindred. Thus instead of having a purely floating and conjectural
basis for our dealings with the vocables of the Vedic language, we can
work with confidence upon a solid and reliable foundation.
Naturally, it does not follow that because a Vedic word may or must
have had at one time a particular significance, that significance can
be safely applied to the actual text of the Veda. But we do establish
a sound sense and a clear possibility of its being the right sense for
the Veda. The rest is a matter of comparative study of the passages
in which the word occurs and of constant fitness in the context. I have
continually found that a sense thus restored illumines always the context
wherever it is applied and on the other hand that a sense demanded always
by the context is precisely that to which we are led by the history
of the word. This is a sufficient basis for a moral, if not for an absolute
certainty.
Secondly, one remarkable feature of language in its inception is the
enormous number of different meanings of which a single word was capable
and also the enormous number of words which could be used to represent
a single idea. Afterwards this tropical luxuriance came to be cut down.
The intellect intervened with its growing need of precision, its growing
sense of economy. The bearing capacity of words progressively diminished;
and it became less and less tolerable to be burdened with a superfluous
number of words for the same idea, a redundant variety of ideas for
the same word. A considerable, though not too rigid economy in these
respects, modified by a demand for a temperate richness of variation,
became the final law of language. But the Sanskrit tongue never quite
reached the final stages of this development; it dissolved too early
into the Prakrit dialects. Even in its latest and most literary form
it is lavish of varieties of meanings for the same word; it overflows
with a redundant wealth of synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity
for rhetorical devices which in any other language would be difficult,
forced and hopelessly artificial, and especially for the figure of double
sense, of slesa.
The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the development
of language. Even in its outward features it is less fixed than any
classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of forms and inflexions; it
is fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use of cases and tenses.
And on its psychological side it has not yet crystallised, is not entirely
hardened into the rigid forms of intellectual precision. The word for
the Vedic Rishi is still a living thing, a thing of power, creative,
formative. It is not yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself
the parent and former of ideas. It carries within it the memory of its
roots, is still conscient of its own history.
The Rishis' use of language was governed by this ancient psychology
of the Word. When in English we use the word "wolf" or "cow",
we mean by it simply the animal designated; we are not conscious of
any reason why we should use that particular sound for the idea except
the immemorial custom of the language; and we cannot use it for any
other sense or purpose except by an artificial device of style. But
for the Vedic Rishi "vrika" meant the tearer and therefore,
among other applications of the sense, a wolf; "dhenu" meant
the fosterer, nourisher, and therefore a cow. But the original and general
sense predominates, the derived and particular is secondary. Therefore,
it was possible for the fashioner of the hymn to use these common words
with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward the image of the
wolf or the cow, sometimes using it to colour the more general sense,
sometimes keeping it merely as a conventional figure for the psychological
conception on which his mind was dwelling, sometimes losing sight of
the image altogether. It is in the light of this psychology of the old
language that we have to understand the peculiar figures of Vedic symbolism
as handled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common and concrete.
It is so that words like "ghritam", the clarified butter,
"soma", the sacred wine, and a host of others are used.
Moreover, the partitions made by the thought between different senses
of the same word were much less separative than in modern speech. In
English "fleet" meaning a number of ships and "fleet"
meaning swift are two different words; when we use "fleet"
in the first sense we do not think of the swiftness of the ship's motion,
nor when we use it in the second, do we recall the image of ships gliding
rapidly over the ocean. But this was precisely what was apt to occur
in the Vedic use of language. "Bhaga", enjoyment, and bhaga,
share, were for the Vedic mind not different words, but one word which
had developed two different uses. Therefore it was easy for the Rishis
to employ it in one of the two senses with the other at the back of
the mind colouring its overt connotation or even to use it equally in
both senses at a time by a sort of figure of cumulative significance.
"Chanas" meant food but also it meant "enjoyment, pleasure";
therefore it could be used by the Rishi to suggest to the profane mind
only the food given at the sacrifice to the gods, but for the initiated
it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss entering into the physical
consciousness and at the same time suggested the image of the Soma-wine,
at once the food of the gods and the Vedic symbol of the Ananda.
We see everywhere this use of language dominating the Word of the Vedic
hymns. It was the great device by which the ancient Mystics overcame
the difficulty of their task. Agni for the ordinary worshipper may have
meant simply the god of the Vedic fire, or it may have meant the principle
of Heat and Light in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may
have meant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many "givers
of wealth", satisfiers of human desire. How suggest to those capable
of a deeper conception the psychological functions of the God? The word
itself fulfilled that service. For Agni meant the Strong, it meant the
Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. So it could easily recall to the
initiated, wherever it occurred, the idea of the illumined Energy which
builds up the worlds and which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of
the great work, the Purohit of the human sacrifice.
Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all these gods are personalities
of the one universal Deva? The names of the gods in their very meaning
recall that they are only epithets, significant names, descriptions,
not personal appellations. Mitra is the Deva as the Lord of love and
harmony, Bhaga as the Lord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of illumination,
Varuna as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supporting
and perfecting the world. "The Existent is One," says the
Rishi Dirghatamas, "but the sages express It variously; they say
Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Agni; they call It Agni, Yama, Matariswan."
[Rv. I.164.46.] The initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge
had no need of this express statement. The names of the gods carried
to him their own significance and recalled the great fundamental truth
which remained with him always.
But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishis turned against
the preservation of the knowledge. For language changed its character,
rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old familiar senses; the word
contracted and shrank into its outer and concrete significance. The
ambrosial wine of the Ananda was forgotten in the physical offering;
the image of the clarified butter recalled only the gross libation to
mythological deities, lords of the fire and the cloud and the storm-blast,
godheads void of any but a material energy and an external lustre. The
letter lived on when the spirit was forgotten; the symbol, the body
of the doctrine, remained, but the soul of knowledge had fled from its
coverings.
Sri Aurobindo
in "The Secret of the Veda" - SABCL
Volume 10 - pages 45-53
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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